3M

Welcome to 3M’s Class Page!

Autumn 1 

Welcome to Year 3! 

The Autumn term is set to be an exciting and productive time that we hope your child will enjoy. 

This is what we will be covering:

Topic - Our main focus this term will be History and the children will be learning about The Stone Age through to the Iron Age. 

Science - We will be studying Rocks and Soils. This will involve looking at rocks as well as a visit from a Geologist!

English - We will be looking at non-chronological reports and we will have Wednesday mornings with our school storyteller Maria. She will tell the children interactive stories as well as helping the children to become more confident and explore drama. We will be making links with our history topic throughout English.

Maths - We will be starting with place value and numbers to 1000 then moving onto addition and subtraction. We will also have multiplication and arithmetic workshops to develop these skills. 

RE - We will look at role models, our heroes and begin to look at the religion of Islam.

Check out website pages regularly for updates on our exciting work!

The School Garden.

Today we ventured into the school garden for the first time this year! We mostly weeded the planters in preparation for planting flowers and vegetables over the year. We started by planting some leeks which will hopefully be ready by Christmas! The children really enjoyed the hands on experience and working collaboratively to look after our garden. Watch this space for the ever growing allotment!

Inspire spelling workshop - 8.10.19

Today we had some of our wonderful parents come along to join our spelling workshop. We had word searches and spelling blasts going on as well as spelling versions of snap and noughts and crosses. The children also got creative and made their words out of pipe cleaners! The children really enjoy doing spelling blasts every morning during the school day so they enjoyed finding out new ways to make learning spellings fun!

Thank you to parents that came along and supported their child!

Reading

4.10.19

This week in reading we have been ready about the gruesome Mr Gum! We recorded our thoughts about Mr Gum once we had read it. We explored the vocabulary from the extract and used our skimming and scanning skills to find the vocabulary that describes Mr Gum. We also did a word association game where we connected vocabulary with pictures using our knowledge of the text to help us!

Topic

10.9.19

Today was our Stone Age day! This kicked started our topic by looking at the Stone Age. We had a mysterious visitor in the hall that turned out to be Om the Stone Age woman! We travelled back in time to question her on what life was like before becoming archaeologists to predict what some Stone Age artefacts were.

1.10.19

Today we had our Topic Marvellous Middle! We went into a Mantle (a drama strategy where we the children take on a different role) as archaeologists  to figure out who the skeleton belonged to and what and why he was buried with artefacts. The children took on the role confidently and came up with original and fantastic ideas! They then returned to their classrooms and learnt all about the Amesbury Archer from archaeologists understanding he had a bad knee by observing his skeleton, to being buried with over 100 artefacts to take with him to his next life!

Science 

Discover the three types of rocks!

13.9.19

To kickstart our learning journey in Science, we had a sensational starter where Mr Collins, a real life geologist came in show us about rocks, soils and how the three types of rocks are formed!

To discover how sedimentary rocks form, the children each had a pot of pasta and butter to represent bits of rocks, shells, clay and sand called sediment. When the children shook the pots, mimicking the turbulence in rivers, the different parts fuse together, forming a rock.

To to discover how metamorphic rocks go through a big change, children had a piece of foil, representing the rock. They had to apply pressure to the foil, as pressure pushes rocks to change form when in the ground. Heat also changed the form of rocks. The children had a bag of butter and when they applied heat from their hands it melted and changed form, as a rock would in the ground.

24.9.19

In today’s lesson, we did a hardness test on different types of rocks. This was testing for how hard the rocks were and understanding what erosion is. The children used nails, lollipop sticks and sandpaper to how each rock eroded before ranking them and classifying them into the three rock types. 

9.10.19

In Science this week, we had our Marvellous Middle! We went into a mantle and became archaeologists, much like our Topic Marvellous Middle! In fact weren’t just archaeologists looking for anything, we were palaeontologists looking for fossils! We carefully searched for the fossils (among other rocks) and brushed the sand off them carefully like real palaeontologists would! 

RE

9.10.19

Today we were looking at the qualities of the prophet Muhammad. He showed his people how to be kind, caring and wise. We applied these skills to our everyday school life! The children used drama to act out their own scenes showing one of the qualities. We also discussed how this links to our school respect agenda of equality which the children learnt about previously with Mrs Driver in assembly. We therefore built on their prior knowledge so the children understood how to show equality day to day.